The weekend artists

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Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter.

Yes, this is one of those lazy end-of-year retrospectives, a look back at all the artists whose work was highlighted in the weekend posts for 2011. Thanks to BibliOdyssey, Form is Void and 50 Watts for so often pointing the way.

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Blasphemous Rumours (2009/2010) by Ryan Martin. The artist now has a dedicated site for his paintings.

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DG-2499 (1975) by the fantastic (in every sense of the word) Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929–2005). See the Dmochowski Gallery for a comprehensive collection of the artist’s work.

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Weekend links 74

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Johnny YesNo video cover, 1983. Design by Neville Brody.

Being a Cabaret Voltaire enthusiast of long standing it was good to hear last week about the imminent reappearance of Johnny YesNo, an hour-long film by Peter Care for which the Cabs provided the soundtrack. Mute Records will be releasing Care’s debut on DVD in a set which includes two versions of the film together with two music CDs. I never got to see the original release on CV’s VHS label, Doublevision; for most of the 1980s I didn’t even have a colour TV never mind a video recorder so I missed all CV’s videocassettes aside from Gasoline In Your Eye. The new edition will be available in November. Brainwashed has a list of the contents while The Quietus posted a clip from the new “redux” version. (And before anyone tells me it’s on YouTube…yeah, everything is on YT in shitty quality and barnacled with the misanthropy-inducing drivel which passes there for comment. If I’m going to watch something for the first time I’d prefer it to be on a shiny disc, thanks.)

• The world has noticed Terrence Malick again following the release of The Tree of Life. Malick’s second feature is returning briefly to UK cinema screens, an event which prompted David Thomson to ask Is Days of Heaven the most beautiful film ever made?

• This week in imaginative art: S. Elizabeth on The Fantastical Fairy Tale Art of Sveta Dorosheva, AS Byatt on the strange paintings of Richard Dadd (there’s another Dadd article here), and Rick Poynor on Chris Foss and the Technological Sublime.

Ethan Hein demonstrates how Alan Lomax came to have copyright control over many songs he had nothing to do with simply by recording traditional music.

Visual Vitriol:  The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation, a book by David Ensminger.

• More Club Silencio: Inside David Lynch’s Paris nightclub and a gallery of photos.

Histoire un-Naturelle, selected works by Ruth Marten.

Come hither: The deceptive beauty of orchids.

Facsimile Dust Jackets.

• More Peter Care: Just Fascination (1983) by Cabaret Voltaire | Sensoria (1984) by Cabaret Voltaire | Rise (1986) by Public Image Ltd.

Weekend links 68

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Every man and every woman is a star by Sveta Dorosheva.

• Matt Taylor (illustration) with Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley (design) provide new Penguin covers for John Le Carré. I love the look which seems inspired by Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence for Casino Royale even if it doesn’t quite suit the shabby world of George Smiley and the Circus.

[Deborah Kass] told me that when she was going to art school in the ’70s, she tripped on LSD almost every week and she said she felt it was her “moral duty as an artist to take the trip.” […] I think psychedelic experience makes you think that there are multiple realities, that there isn’t just this one normal real world to which we’re supposed to conform, but that the reality changes depending on the state of consciousness that we’re in when we’re experiencing it. So, any different kind of art kind of posits a different reality. (more)

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson discussing his new book Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art.

• “That got me thinking that evolution really isn’t survival of the fittest, when it comes to these things, it is more like survival of the interesting, survival of the beautiful, survival of the weird, cool stuff that managed to evolve.” Laurie Anderson and David Rothenberg discuss music and animals.

• Laura Cumming on the late Lucian Freud. And Stephen Heller on Alex Steinweiss, the originator in 1939 of the artistic record sleeve who also died last week.

• Alan Moore says “Think Locally: Fuck ‘Globally'”. He and Queen Calluz explain how Dodgem Logic magazine puts their ideas into practice.

Adam Curtis gets interviewed while Alan Bennett returns to Armley Public Library in Leeds.

Peacock’s Garden, a celebration of pavonine splendour.

• A visit to Seher Shah’s studio in Brooklyn, New York.

• Maximum androgyny at Epicenity, a Tumblr.

Does your god have a penis?

Chrysalide (1978) is an album of “cosmic” guitar instrumentals by Michel Moulinié which sounds at times like a French equivalent of Manuel Göttsching. It’s never been released on CD but a copy can be found here.